How To Make A Pine Forest Hiker Cake

Happy birthday to The Northeast Hiker!  In celebration, I’m sharing how to make this awesome coniferous forest hiker cake.  This cake would make a great birthday treat for a backpacking buddy or a sweet Valentine’s Day surprise for your favorite hiker.

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Forest Cake Materials

• Cake and frosting of your choice
• Pretzel sticks
• Green Candy Melts
• 1 quart freezer bag
• Waxed paper

This works best if the pretzels are as long and thin as possible.  The best that I could find in my grocery store were these Bachman Pretzel Stix.  I had to buy a six pack of the 100 calorie snack trays but I don’t mind all the extras because they make awesome trail snacks.  Pretzels are awesome dipped in peanut butter and the box keeps these from getting completely crushed in my pack.

I bought the 12 ounce bag of Wilton Candy Melts in dark green and that was way more than I needed for this cake.  Wilton also makes two ounce “Drizzle Pouches”  that allow you to melt the candy right in the package.  These would probably work great but my store was sold out of the green.

Step 1: Make The Cake

If you love to bake, whip up your favorite cake recipe.  I made mine from a boxed mix with a few small tweaks to make it taste homemade.  If you are short on time, you can also buy an undecorated cake from your local bakery.  

Cover the cake with your frosting of choice.  I didn’t have quite enough frosting to cover the sides of my cake but it still tasted delicious 🙂

Step 2: Melt The Candy Melts

To make things less messy, I melted the candy right in the zip top bag that I piped from.  To do this, you need a freezer bag.  The thinner zip top storage bags should not go in the microwave.  

I heated up about half the bag of candy melts.  This turned out to be much more than I needed but the candies can be remelted so any extra can be saved for future projects.

There should be melting instructions on the package.  Be sure to use a low power setting on your microwave. Mine took about four minutes to melt on the defrost setting.  You certainly don’t heat to heat them for that long all at once though. About every minute or so I took them out and squished the bag with my fingers to stir and check the consistency.  

Step 3: Pipe The Trees

When your candy is melted, cut a small hole in one corner of the bag.  It is best to start small and test it out. You can always make to hole a little bigger if you need to.

Lay a few pretzel “tree trunks” on a sheet of wax paper and begin piping branches.  I started at the top and piped zigzags across the pretzel rod, gradually making them wider as I got closer to the bottom to make a triangle.  Make sure to leave at least an inch of trunk at the bottom of each tree to stick into the cake.

Try to make trees in a variety of sizes.  It is also a good idea to make a few extra in case any break.

Step 4:  Plant Your Forest

When your trees are dry, gently peel them off of the wax paper and begin arranging them on your cake.  I found that the trees are more sturdy if you press them down far enough so that the bottom branches are in the frosting.

Snack on any extra trees and then surprise your favorite hiker with their very own edible forest!

If you make your own hiker cake, be sure to tag The Northeast Hiker on Instagram or Twitter so we can see how it comes out!